I like McCloud's definition fine. While it leaves some gray areas (My own work often falling into these), it leaves them in places that I don't have any real problems with.

Jaqeues Derrida took the opinion that a you could never formulate a stable and coherent interpretation of any text. It would appear from the ongiong discussion that this applies to single words as well._________________House of Stairs

Nyarlathotep is using the term "Closure" in the way that Scott uses it in "Understanding Comics," which is to mean: The act of the reader to determine what happens between two consecutive panels. This has more to do with the mathematical definition of the word where "closure" means to complete an equasion. Perhaps a better and more accurate term than "closure" is interpolation.

edit: Except that the word interpolation doesn't necessarily work for all forms of comics panel transitions, since some don't have the sort of relationship where anything should happen inbetween them. Difficult to pin down in words._________________Good morning! That's a nice tnetennba.

Last edited by Greg Stephens on Fri May 17, 2002 12:41 pm; edited 1 time in total

it's kinda like asking 'what is art?' people may say sequential images but that is so subjective. i mean if i juxtapose a picture of a wooly mammoth with one of a cloned sheep, that's as sequential as anything else. so i guess what i'am saying is that there really is no one answer. everyone who replies will have a different answer.

i mean if i juxtapose a picture of a wooly mammoth with one of a cloned sheep, that's as sequential as anything else.

Yes, but if you did it because you WANTED to form a sequence by juxtaposition, it's comics.

Art is in the eye of the beholder, it's true, but the creation of an art, is in the purpose of the creator.

Now if someone can come tell us that it's only the reader that creates the comics by looking at it and saying/recognising "this is comics!", that's fine by me. But if you want to define comics in an objective way, it's impossible unless you pass on the judgment to creator or reader.

The dancing robots in the improv section, for instance were comics because Scott created them to be and function that way. If they functioned that way or not (the end effect) was up to the reader, so if you're saying comics is what "feels" like comics, the robots may never have been comics in the first place in the eyes of a lot of readers. Just as "Duchamp"'s "urinoir" (i don't know the english word, so I hope someone can correct me) still isn't a statue to many persons, even if it is accepted as such by the art community, and this only because to a lot of people a statue has to be "made" and the urinoir wasn't made by the artist, nor was it made with the purpose of serving as an art object. It became an art object by being signed, put on a pedestal, and being entered in an art competition (THIS was in the 1920's or 1930's, so you may understand what an uproar THIS made, compared to the small flame wars on these boards )

Well that's it. Now I'm goin' to bed (I'm passing too much time discussing comics than is healthy for me )_________________Check out my new site (under construction) at: InkAddict